Transcript Chasing the Energizer Bunny

Chasing the
Energizer Bunny
Ben Zorn
Microsoft Research
1
Form Factor Fuels Innovation
 Form factor more important now than CPU
performance
 Power efficiency and form factor linked
 No one talks about the “power wall”
 Battery technology not improving exponentially
 Entire problem domains revolve around power
performance
 Personal devices exploding
 Cell phones, Ipod, PSP, mp3 players
 Devices fundamentally change how we live, work
Ben Zorn
 “Ipod Moms”, Ben’s
audible
books
MSP’05
Wild Ideas
Microsoft Research
Prediction: Multi-core follows Power
 My prediction:
 Greatest uptake in multi-core designs will be
in systems that don’t have as much legacy
code
 Opportunities for 10-100x power reductions
are available, under-investigated
 Domain-specific applications of multi-core
easier to bring to market (voice recognition,
vision, etc.)
 “The revolution has already begun.”
Ben Zorn
MSP’05 Wild Ideas
Microsoft Research
Implied Research Agenda?
 Complexity increases power consumption
(David Sehr)
 Out-of-order execution inefficient, out of favor
 Incidentally, also increases security risk
 General-purpose HW less power efficient than
special-purpose
 Hiding latency the best use of all those
transistors (in caches)?
 A return to RISC-style HW/SW design?
 Every field rediscovers “simplicity” on predictable
schedule
Ben Zorn
MSP’05 Wild Ideas
Microsoft Research
Relation to MSP?
 Performance should include power efficiency
 The power cost of latency reduction and/or
implementation complexity should be
quantified
 More papers in MSP about power
 Better frameworks for evaluating power
efficiency
 More evaluations of designs in context of
actual systems (not SPEC)
Ben Zorn
MSP’05 Wild Ideas
Microsoft Research